IC-Chapter 1-Never Get Old(Rawlings/Yeager/Bill Johns/Jim)

[Philulhu]

OOC,Posted that from my phone so I'm using that as my excuse! ;)

"Have you got an address for Terry?" asked Bill. "We'll go and pay him a visit, see what he knows. And can you ask around and see if anyone's heard of Marianna?"

[Mr. Handy]

"I'll look into it," said Brooks. "It'll be hard to come up with something when we've only got a first name on Marianna, but Terry Williams will be easier to track down."

"If he's in the system, we'll have his address," Yeager said. He picked up the phone on Brooks's desk and dialed an extension. "This is Lieutenant Yeager. I need the criminal record and current address of a Terrance Williams." He paused. "Uh huh." He waited for a couple of minutes, obviously on hold. Then his face lit up. "Great, thanks!" He hung up the phone and grinned at Bill. "Got it. His record has a number of counts for theft and burglary, and his apartment is a bit south of Center City. You ready to drop in on him?"

[Philulhu]

"Yeah," replied Bill, "Let's go see if he's got the coffee on." He thanked Detective Brooks for his time. "If you find out who Marianna is, you'll give me a call?"

[Mr. Handy]

Terry Williams's Apartment - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
8:00 AM - Friday, July 18, 1969

Yeager and Bill went out to the parking lot and got into Yeager's red Mustang, which he drove to the western part of Center City, where they soon found the address they had for Terrance Luis Williams. It was an ordinary three-story apartment building that looked pretty much like all of the others on this block. Williams had his apartment on the third floor. They managed to find a parking spot down the block from the building.

"So, how do you want to play this?" Yeager said. "Wanna sit around on a boring stakeout waiting for a guy who for all we know has already skipped town, or just go up and knock on his door?"

[Philulhu]

Bill glanced at his watch. "If we sit and wait, chances are we could be here for some time. Something tells me that Terrance isn't the type of guy who's up at the crack of dawn. Let's go knock on the door and give him an unexpected alarm call, shall we?"

[Mr. Handy]

Yeager grinned broadly. "That's my man! Let's go!" He and Bill got out of the car and went inside. The vestibule was small and cramped, with a row of locked mailboxes for the tenants on the left. A door led inside to a stairwell. The door to the ground floor apartment was on the landing there, with another door on each of the two landings above to the apartment on each floor. They ascended the two flights of stairs to the third floor apartment, where Yeager rapped on the door with his fist, making enough noise to wake anyone who might still be sleeping. There was no response.

[Philulhu]

"We going in?" said Bill to Yeager. "You're younger than me. I'll let you open the door."

[Mr. Handy]

"You bet we're going in," said Yeager, trying the doorknob, though the door was locked. He leaned hard on the door. It popped open with almost no effort, and there wasn't even any visible evidence that the door had been forced open. Yeager seemed to be an old hand at this sort of entry. "Guess it was just stuck, huh?" he added with a wink.

The two of them entered the tiny studio apartment, which was barely big enough for them. It had minimal furnishings, and none of them were anything special. It was apparent that the apartment's occupant was quite poor, and also after a cursory inspection that he was not at home. There was a small bed, a little writing desk with a similarly sized wooden chair, a closet containing grubby clothes that looked like they would fit a teenager, a small kitchen area with a fridge and stove, and a black and white television with a 13-inch screen.

OOC,[b]Bill[/b], please roll Spot Hidden if you want to search. Also, you should specify what exactly you are searching. If there's something to be found in a particular location you specify, you'll find it regardless of the roll's outcome.

[Philulhu]

OOC,Nope, can't see anything... [url=http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3813317/]Bill searches Terrance's abode. (1d100=40)[/url]

Bill searched the apartment methodically. He started with the writing desk, checking any papers on there, trying the drawers and not forgetting the waste paper basket. That done, he checked the bed, lifting the mattress to look underneath and got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed.

"Druggies sometimes keep their stash in the fridge," he said to Yeagar as he moved through to the kitchen. He opened the fridge, checking the contents, before trying the cupboards and the cooker.

[Mr. Handy]

Sorting through the writing desk, Bill found a journal that looked like it might be interesting in one of the drawers. The desk also contained blank paper, pens, pencils, and other things that would be useful for someone who wrote a lot. The fridge contained various cheap foodstuffs, including a large number of apples. There was no sign of any drugs.

"Any luck?" asked Yeager, whose own search was fruitless.

[Philulhu]

"Just this," replied Bill, showing Yeagar the journal. He flicked it open to the latest entry to see what had been written.

[Mr. Handy]

The last entry was dated yesterday morning, and it was a gold mine of information. It contained a summary of the results of the first round of Morpheus experiments. Terry concluded that Morpheus was intended to enable someone to take control of their dreams to some extent. Not only that, it seemed that the intention was to use it to visit locations in the real world while dreaming, and to observe without being observed. The test subjects are never referred to by name, but rather by a number from 1 to 6. The first round of experiments had lasted 3 nights, over the July 4th weekend. The first night, the subjects were instructed to dream about exploring Philadelphia, apparently to get them acclimated to the process and start off simple. The second night, the students were told to dream about being in Moscow and to attempt to infiltrate the Kremlin. They were told to look for any documents and photographs they could find about a certain phrase in Russian and remember what they could, but Terry didn't know the language and had been unable to translate the Cyrillic letters. On the third and final night, they were told to dream about being on the moon.

Subjects 2, 3, and 5 had various random and unrelated dreams - when they could remember them at all. It seemed likely that they were the control group. Subjects 1, 4, and 6 were able to follow their instructions. On the first night they did dream about walking around Philadelphia. Subject 4 went off by himself (at least, the student is presumably male from the context, but with the sexual revolution one can never be sure) and spent hours watching women undress and bathe in bathrooms while they were completely unaware of him. Subjects 1 and 6, oddly enough, were together in their dreams, and both of them recalled the same experiences. They spent their time visiting various tourist attractions: the Liberty Bell, the house where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and Betsy Ross's house were the ones they remembered.

On the second night, all three subjects split up in Moscow and were able to just walk past the Kremlin guards without being detected. Subject 6 was the only one who found papers with the specified Russian phrase, in a highly secure room underneath the Kremlin, but did not know the language and was unable to translate them. There were, however, a few accompanying photos of Russians sitting cross-legged in what looked like a trance state. Subject 1 did know Russian, but was unable to find any relevant documents.

On the third night, the three subjects successfully dreamed about being on the moon and again split up. Subjects 1 and 4 just walked through a barren wasteland without incident, but subject 6 encountered a flying monster that was described as "like a dragon, with scaly skin and huge wings." The monster saw the student and swooped down to attack, and that's when she awakened.

"Well, isn't that interesting?" said Yeager, reading over Bill's shoulder. "Wonder where he got all this information?"

OOC,[b]Bill[/b], you may roll Other Language: Russian to try to translate the phrase. The base skill is 1%.

[Philulhu]

OOC,[url=http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/view/3822231/]Can Bill speak Russian? (1d100=91)[/url] Nyet, comrade...

"This stuff's dynamite. He's either on the programme or someone is feeding him information," said Bill. "I reckon if we cross reference Terry's known contacts with the list of people on the trial, we might find out who it is." He tapped the Cyrillic writing. "We could ask if there's a Russian-speaker at the university and see if we can find out what this means - unless you've got someone down the station who speaks Russkie?"

[Mr. Handy]

"I don't know of anyone," said Yeager. "I don't know about trusting someone at the university to translate this. We don't know what this gobbledygook really says, and letting word about it spread could be disastrous. The only people there likely to know Russian are probably Commies anyway. Maybe we should read the previous entries. We might find out how this guy learned all this stuff."

[Philulhu]

"Fair enough," replied Bill. He sat down on the small chair and started flicking back through the entries in the journal.

[Mr. Handy]

Yeager transcribed the Cyrillic letters into his notebook.

The penultimate entry was dated Wednesday night and read: "Just got back from visiting Jimmy. It didn't work out too well. Maybe I'll have a more sucessful chance later. I'm going to take a nap before I head out."

The one before that one, also from Wednesday night, said: "The job did not go as planned. I was spotted by a guard, and was chased into hiding. I was going to check the lab, but I ended up almost being caught by the guard again.

I'm leaving to give Jim a piece of my mind, and get some answers to this whole fiasco."

Flipping back another page, Bill found an entry from earlier still on Wednesday evening: "At the bar this evening, I overheard two of the people I was watching at the university earlier today. They seemed to know I was following them, and I didn't feel exactly safe knowing that they might know what I'm up to. If this goes down the way I expect, I might be suspected for sometime. It was sort of small, but I hope I convinced the girl. But I hope this isn't going to be too tough. After all, it looks like chocolate milk, according to Jimmy."

[Philulhu]

"Do we have a list of who was at the bar the other night?" asked Bill. "Who's this Jimmy character?"

[Mr. Handy]

"The uniforms would have gotten people's names," said Yeager, "but it's possible some of them slipped out in the confusion. We also don't know what time on Wednesday night he was at the bar, or even if it was the same bar. It could have been before or after we were there. Jimmy has to be James Salvatore, the late, lamented fence in whose ledger you found the lead to Terry Williams. So Williams had an axe to grind with him. Interesting. Let's look back further to see how he got into this mess in the first place. We should also look up the guard who spotted him at some point."

[Philulhu]

Bill continued to flick back through the journal, looking for any reference to Morpheus, the Andersons or any experiments that Terry was involved in.

[Mr. Handy]

Bill read the next entry back, which was from Wednesday morning. Terry had received a call from Jimmy Salvatore asking him to do a special job, seeing as he had done good work for him in the past. He was offering Terry five hundred dollars if he could get Jimmy a sample of a new drug called Morpheus. It was described as a brown liquid resembling chocolate milk, and Jimmy had mentioned that it had been developed by Dr. Gregory Anderson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine. He had an office and a lab in John Morgan Hall.

None of the entries before that mentioned Morpheus, the Andersons, or experiments, though some of them alluded to prior heists he had pulled, and Jimmy Salvatore, also referred to sometimes as Jimmy the Hand, was mentioned in conjunction with several of them. The language was phrased in such a way as to disguise the illegal nature of Terry's jobs, but it was obvious that this was the diary of a thief's exploits.